


Flight

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Airplane Crashes, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Human, F/M, Family Drama, M/M, Plane Crashes, Severe Injury to Major Characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-10 18:31:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1163080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Follow me on <a href="http://literatec.tumblr.com">Tumblr</a>, if you wish.</p><p>Please do not add this, or any of my posted works, to Goodreads. Thank you.</p></blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Flight 117 from Paris to New York, departed Charles de Gaulle airport at 4:35 PM. Reports at the time indicated sparks or flashes of light seen at the right wing wheel well as the landing gear retracted, but the pilots reported no trouble on board, and it was considered to be a fluke or a trick of the light. At 4:42 PM, the pilots indicated that they were experiencing some issues with their sonar and the electrical equipment in the cockpit, and would be returning to the Paris airport for mechanical safety checks and possible deplaning. At 4:48 PM, the control tower at Charles de Gaulle lost communication with Flight 117, and no more was heard from the plane until the black box recorder was retrieved from the wreckage found in a largely uninhabited area on the French-German border. 

That in itself was a clue to just how wrong things had gone; Flight 117 was not schedule to be anywhere near that airspace. Even worse was the discovery that it was not the entirety of the wreckage at all; bits and pieces of the Airbus A330 were found beginning around thirty miles outside of Paris, with debris fields getting larger and larger as they neared the German border. Of the 277 souls aboard the ill-fated plane, only 62 survived. Of the 215 dead, only 59 sets of remains, some only partial, were ever found.

Four years later, questioning and inquiries about what had happened were ongoing, with no answers yet found.

 

Dean Winchester had been sitting in the economy section of the plane, in a window seat just before the left wing of the plane. Beside him sat Castiel Godwin, in the middle seat of the row of three. He had joked with Dean, trying to distract him from his fear of flying, and offered to switch seats if it would help; somewhere in their booking, they had mixed up their tickets, landing Dean in the window seat with a bird’s eye view of the ground below, when Castiel had tried to ensure that the phobic man would be more sheltered in the middle seat. Dean had refused, not wanting to share space with the heavily perfumed woman in the third seat, and tried to make the best of it. After all, it was only eight hours – or, rather, it should have been.

Forty-five minutes later, Dean found himself dazed and alone, still strapped in his seat with an oxygen mask half-melted to his cheek, beneath a shattered hull-piece of the plane. When the sirens began to wail and he was finally pulled out, with two broken legs, a shattered elbow, some burns, cuts, and scrapes, he was only vaguely aware that he was still in France, based mostly on the many exclamations of “mon dieu” echoing around him, and simply kept asking to see ‘Cas’.

The emergency workers only eyed him sadly, but said nothing of any other survivors. It turned out that Dean Winchester was the only living soul found in that particular debris field.

He had to take a ship home. His younger brother, Sam, and his fiancée Jessica, had flown in to see Dean as soon as they got the news, and were set to accompany him home once the hospital in Reims was ready to release him, but even doped up on a ridiculous amount of anti-anxiety medication, Dean panicked the moment they entered the airport. They settled on a transatlantic cruise to New York after taking a train to the port, and Dean spent the entire time alone in his cabin.

Four years later, Dean had still not set foot in another airport. But even more about his life had indeed changed.


	2. Chapter 2

A warm day in May found a flurry of activity at Dean’s conservative split-level home on the outskirts of the city. They had closed on the house only weeks before, and had barely gotten moved in when it became time for Ben’s eighth birthday party. Thankfully, they were still near enough to the boy’s school friends that most were able to attend. 

Dean had ducked inside to grab another beer – because really, fourteen screaming third graders in his backyard, he needed a damn beer or six – and found himself staring out the kitchen window into the domestic bliss that had thrown up all over the place. It wasn’t quite what had been in the cards for him, or so he had thought, but time can do weird things.

Loss can do weird things.

Lisa Braeden had been a fleeting if memorable fling while on a Labor Day road trip during his third year of college. Dean honestly had never expected to see her again, and had been shocked to the core when, some six years prior, she had showed up with a two year old boy who had a habit of pulling a blinding grin that looked an awful lot like Dean’s. 

The boy’s mother insisted for years that the little boy, Ben, was simply the product of poorly chosen one night stand, even if the math and the child’s clear genetics said otherwise. She still took the boy to see him occasionally, often at Dean’s invitation, but made it clear she and her son didn’t need him as any permanent fixture in their lives. It all changed when Dean finally came back from Paris, broken and bruised as he was, and Lisa tearfully admitted the truth: Ben was his son. She had only lied to protect the boy, not wanting him to become attached to the man she thought Dean was, the man he had been in his youth, one who would roll into town for a roll in the hay, then speed back out before the morning light.

 

It still took three years for them to decide to become a family, and a wedding date was set for that coming July. Now with a house and a kid and a wife to be, Dean wondered if he should start shopping for a minivan and sports bra, because with Lisa working full time at her yoga studio and Dean, a freelance copywriter, spending his days at home and carting Ben around, he was pretty much a soccer mom.

“A little too suburban for my tastes, I’m afraid,” a voice cut into his thoughts and Dean’s face pulled into a grin, even as he stared out the window. Seconds later he froze in place, recognizing for the first time that the voice, the one he had never forgotten and had heard so often in his own head, had actually been speaking aloud this time.

Dean turned slowly, so painfully slow, afraid he would hit the ground if he moved too swiftly. His world had been thrown off kilter. This couldn’t be – it just couldn’t. And yet there he was, standing there in jeans and a t-shirt, army green duffle bag at his sneakered feet, like nothing had happened at all.

Like nothing.

Like he wasn’t a living ghost, a dead man brought back to life, standing in the kitchen, grinning at Dean with his gummy smile, more creases at the corners of his eyes than there used to be and the faintest pink slash of a scar across his forehead, but solid and alive and so real it took Dean’s breath away.

“Under the mat, Winchester?” he asked, holding up the little silver spare key that Dean had hidden outside the front door. “A little cliché, don’t you think?”

“Cas…” Dean finally said, the breath he had been holding coming out in a rush on that single syllable. 

“Hello Dean,” Cas replied, softer this time, fondness still shining brightly in his eyes. He was thinner, Dean noticed now, and there were more scars, on his arms and creeping out from the collar of his shirt. But the smile was the same, even the posture, the tense way he hunched his shoulders when he was nervous, and the mixture of concern and joy in his gaze.

For a moment, the world swam, and Dean had to grip the counter to keep from falling. Cas took an immediate step forward to help, but forced himself to stop, concerned his advance would be unwelcome.

“Cas?” Dean finally said again. “Am I losing my mind here?”

Cas shook his head. “It’s me, Dean. I swear, it’s really me.”

It was enough to break Dean from where he stood frozen, and he took a tentative step forward, reaching out with both hands to simply touch Cas’ face and prove to himself that the other man was real. The stubbled skin beneath his palms was enough to cement the fact that Castiel Godwin, long presumed dead and gone, was standing alive and well in Dean’s kitchen on a sunny May afternoon, four years since they had gripped hands together tightly while their plane fell out of the sky.

Dean choked back a sob and threw his arms around the other man, pulling him into a tight embrace. They were both shaking now, tears falling freely, arms locked around each other as though each feared the other might drift away if they dared let go, Dean sending fervent prayers of thanks to a god he had declared dead the day they pulled him out of the wreckage alone.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://literatec.tumblr.com), if you wish.
> 
> Please do not add this, or any of my posted works, to Goodreads. Thank you.


End file.
